‘Love Song: The Lives of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya’

There was a time, not so long ago, when Kurt Weill was known mainly as the composer of a handful of hit songs, usually heard in versions far removed from their original, often transgressive contexts. Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald transformed “Mack the Knife” into an upbeat jazz standard, and Bobby Darin made it a smooth pop hit. Broadway fans knew “September Song,” a survivor from the long-forgotten 1938 “Knickerbocker Holiday.” And the rock generation knew the Doors’ take on “Alabama Song,” unaware that it was all the rage in Berlin — and the centerpiece of an opera — in 1930.

Nowadays, Weill holds a solid place in the pantheon of 20th-century composers, and the flexibility that had worked against him among genre categorizers during his lifetime — is he a serious classical composer or a Broadway tunesmith? — marks him as a harbinger of today’s boundary-crossing musicians. Moreover, the long-held notion that Weill underwent a thorough style change when he arrived in the United States in 1935 has been largely, if not completely, discredited.

It is true, after all, that the shows he wrote for the Broadway stage — “Johnny Johnson,” “Lady in the Dark” and “Lost in the Stars” among them — have a melodic opulence in which we sense the rosy aroma of the 1940s musical. But the American theater style was something Weill assimilated, more as an expansion of his vocabulary than a change of direction. And in most important details — from the shapes of his melodies to the intricacies of his orchestrations — these works have a rhythmic punchiness and a blend of lyricism and acidity that can be traced back to Weill’s epochal Berlin works, “Die Dreigroschenoper” (“The Threepenny Opera”) and “Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny” (“Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny”) — the sources for “Mack the Knife” and “Alabama Song,” respectively.

You would expect Weill to be an ideal subject for Ethan Mordden, a respected and prolific author with a specialty in opera, musical theater and film (and a novelist whose 2008 historical fantasy, “The Jewcatcher,” is set in the German milieu of Weill’s early career). And indeed, Weill is treated sympathetically and knowledgeably in “Love Song,” a dual biography of the composer and his wife, the singer Lotte Lenya, whose unpolished soprano was an inspiring force for Weill.

Mordden covers the biographical essentials ably, and offers an overview of how Weill’s works, large and small, made their way from the drawing board to the stage. Not surprisingly, given the turbulence of Weill’s times, the early chapters actually have three distinct threads: there is Weill, born in 1900 to a musical Jewish family (his father was a synagogue cantor) in Dessau, Germany; ­Lenya, born Karoline Wilhelmine Charlotte Blamauer to a working-class Catholic family in Vienna, in 1898; and the troubled sweep of European history from just before World War I to the failure of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis, which spelled the end of Europe for the Weills.

Weill’s crimes, in the Nazis’ eyes, began with his Jewishness but were artistic too. His early concert works, while hardly as iconoclastic as, say, Schoenberg’s, had an acerbic edge that the Nazis found objectionable, and the operas, with their mixed currents of cabaret, jazz and modernism — to say nothing of their left-leaning librettos by the likes of Bertolt ­Brecht and Georg Kaiser — touched on just about every aspect of contemporary music that the Nazis deplored as decadent.

Weill, alone at first, with Lenya following later, made his way to Paris soon after the Nazis took power, and then to New York, where he collaborated with Max Rein­hardt, Maxwell Anderson, Moss Hart, Ira Gershwin and others on a string of Broadway hits and misses, and with Elmer Rice and Langston Hughes on “Street Scene,” a durable work still heard in opera houses around the world.

But expansive as Mordden’s account is, there is little evidence of fresh research here. Often, the book seems less a traditional biography than an extended riff that occasionally lapses into rants and party pieces. An introduction to George Davis, Lenya’s second husband, and the architect of a revival of Weill’s music after the composer’s death in 1950, is particularly jaw-dropping, starting with its characterization of Davis as “a prime example of the sort of homosexual common to the great cities of Western society for the last several centuries.”

Mordden has more than his share of agendas. Brecht, for one, is a semicomic antihero: Mordden never tires of mentioning his strong body odor, his penchant for pinching literary ideas and getting assistants to do his work, and the dissonance between his supposedly socialist ideals and his disinclination to share credit and royalties. Still, it may be going too far, given the plentiful competition, to call him “literature’s greatest crook.”

At times, the level of discourse plummets alarmingly. Mordden, seemingly outraged that members of an invited audience should have left a preview of “Johnny Johnson” early, asks, “What were they going to do . . . have sex with Beatrice Lillie?” He describes the gray (well, O.K., bald) eminence Virgil Thomson as “that tarantula of a music critic and sometime lady composer.”

Missing is a sense of what Weill and Lenya were like. To the extent that Weill is quoted (mostly from correspondence), it is rarely to discuss his ideas about music generally, or his work specifically, but rather to say how much he loathes various collaborators. Mordden’s apparent source for these quotes, “Speak Low (When You Speak Love): The Letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya,” paints a fuller and more pleasant picture.

So does “The Days Grow Short: The Life and Music of Kurt Weill,” Ronald Sanders’s pioneering 1980 biography. Mordden offers an alternately cheerful and jaundiced, heavily opinionated gloss on Weill and Lenya’s world. But if you want to delve into it more seriously, Sanders is the place to begin.

LOVE SONG

The Lives of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya

By Ethan Mordden

Illustrated. 334 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $29.99.

Correction: January 20, 2013

A review on Jan. 6 about “Love Song: The Lives of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya,” by Ethan Mordden, misspelled the surname of an actress working in musical theater at the same time as the book’s subjects. She was Beatrice Lillie, not Lilly.

Allan Kozinn is a culture reporter for The Times.

A version of this review appears in print on January 6, 2013, on page BR9 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Border Crossings. Today's Paper|Subscribe